Identifying artists, works, or schools of twentieth- and twenty-first-century 2D art - AP Art History

Pablo Picasso painted Guernica in 1937 in response to Franco's fascist Spain.

Andy Warhol's most famous works are screen prints of familiar images, often in odd or bright colors. Jasper Johns appropriated national symbols in his paintings, but in altered forms. Roy Lichtenstein directly copied panels from comic books, down to the dialogue. All of these methods are representative of Pop Art, a 1950s and 60s artistic movement that sought to use popular forms and new technologies to change the nature of high art.

Utilizing large canvases featuring only one or two bold colors in large blocks, Mark Rothko deconstructed the principles of Abstract Expressionism to their simplest form. Beginning in 1949, Rothko's "multiforms" became his chief artistic format, and made him a world-famous artist.

Diego Rivera began his artistic career in Paris during the first decade of the twentieth century as a cubist influenced by Picasso. On moving back to his native Mexico in the 1910s, Rivera began embracing revolutionary politics, more direct figures, and native Mexican culture, as well as painting massive murals on the sides of buildings. These murals made Rivera much more successful, and produced many different commissions around the world.

Cubism burst onto the art scene in Paris in the first decade of the twentieth century, with various artists creating avant garde images based more on representative shapes and symbols rather than strict representations. Pablo Picasso, Juan Gris, Georges Braques, and Fernand Leger were among its most notable proponents. Amedeo Modigliani was a contemporary of the cubists, but worked in modernist approaches to portraits that featured elongated lines and dark colors.

During the Spanish Civil War, Francisco Franco's nationalist forces were supported by the German military led by the Nazis and Adolf Hitler. In one of the more notable aspects of the war, the German Air Force bombed the Spanish, Republican-held town of Guernica in 1937. That same year, Pablo Picasso made a massive canvas, entirely in black and white, that used gruesome abstract shapes and symbols to convey war's horrors and tragedies. The painting was instantly famous, and caused Picasso to be unable to travel to Franco's Spain.

Ansel Adams (1902-1984) was a famous photographer and technical innovator who developed a process of developing film known as "the Zone System" and used the newest photographic technology of his time. The ability of Adams and his technology was seen through his many photographs of National Parks, particularly in the American West. Adams' photographs were most well known for their sharp focus and deep shading in black and white.

Cubism was a modernist art movement that developed in Paris in the first decades of the twentieth century, by a community of multinational artists. The painters Pablo Picasso and George Braques first created the style, which featured images built out of harsh geometric shapes and used representational images to create broken depictions made up of peculiar shapes. Other important cubists included Fernand Léger, Juan Gris, Robert Delaunay, Jean Metzinger, and Henri Le Fauconnier.

Like fellow Pop Artists Lichtenstein and Warhol, Jasper Johns used familiar symbols and images, but reshaped and transformed them to present them in new ways. Unlike his fellow Pop Artists, who preferred commercial and pop culture symbols, Johns largely used icons of Americana, most notably the American flag and maps of the United States. One of Johns' most well known paintings is of an American flag that is completely in white.

Andy Warhol sought to make art that directly engaged and confronted popular culture in unique and surprising ways. Warhol also liked to experiment with methods that had a sense of automation, such as screenprinting. Both of these aspects of Warhol's work were shown in a series of paintings he did in the 1960s, which had images of celebrities like Marilyn Monroe, Elizabeth Taylor, and James Dean reprinted in bright pinks, blues, and greens.

Piet Mondrian was a Dutch artist who was the leading figure among a group of artists in different media who sought a style that was elemental in its construction, known as De Stijl, or "The Style." Mondrian's painting developed into featuring thick black lines intersecting the canvas at right angles to form rectangles on the painting. Inside these rectangles were blocks of color only in the three primary colors.

The twentieth century saw an explosion in artistic forms that both presented non-realistic images, especially Abstract Expressionism and Cubism, or depicted elements of everyday life or lower culture, as Pop Art did. In this, one of the key forerunners to these movements was the late-nineteenth-century movement known as Impressionism. Impressionism had vivid brushstrokes that made images look less realistic, and intentionally depicted scenes of everyday life, like farmwork, cafés, and parks.

The movement known as Pop Art was developed in the post-World-War-II era, taking inspiration from various elements of low culture and popular culture. Often, artists like Andy Warhol and Robert Raushenberg used advertising images in subversive ways, or as the actual artwork itself. Jasper Johns used images of Americana like the American flag in odd ways, while Roy Lichtenstein copied images from comic books.

Amedeo Modigliani was a Jewish painter born in Italy in 1884, but who gained fame in Paris in the 1910s. Embracing many aspects of modernism through associating with fellow modernists in the Montparnasse section of Paris, Modigliani established a unique form of portraiture which featured elongated shapes and empty black eyes. Modigliani died of tuberculosis at the age of 35 in Paris in 1920.

Abstract Expressionism was developed in the immediate post-World War II era as a specific genre of painting that featured non-realistic shapes and took inspiration from free-form styles of music like jazz. Earlier artists like Wassily Kandinsky were pulled into the movement, which was further pushed by artists like Jackson Pollack, with his "drip method," and Willem de Kooning, whose odd figures and textural paintings were archetypical of the movement.

The Spanish Juan Gris arrived in Paris in 1906 and helped develop the style known as Cubism with fellow young artists Georges Braque and Fernand Léger, and under the influence of Gris' fellow Spaniard, Pablo Picasso. Fittingly, one of Gris' signature cubist portraits is of Picasso himself, with a clear depiction of the painter that also features a cubist deconstruction of his clothing and surroundings.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Cubism, the style employed by Juan Gris in the painting seen here, was part of the broader trend of modernism, which was concerned with technological innovation, new ways of thinking, and breaking with tradition. A style which took many of modernism's and cubism's precepts even further was the Italian movement known as Futurism. As much a political movement as an artistic one, Futurism embraced machine age technology, progress, and activity in a cross-artistic style heavily indebted to cubism's breakthroughs.

Figure: Portrait of Pablo Picasso by Juan Gris (1912)

Cezanne's desire to play with shapes, colors, and form in both his still-life and landscape paintings was influential to the artists who developed cubism in the early twentieth century. The cubists' use of geometry and mathematics have a clear forerunner in Cezanne's examination of the various geometric shapes present in his still-life paintings. Additionally, Cezanne's ability to convey an image that was not perfectly realistic showed the possibilities in abstract art.

Dada was an art movement that grew out of abstract and modernist movements in the early twentieth century. One of the most famous dadaist artists was Marcel Duchamp, a frenchman who began his career in a cubist vein, but then sought to make art that was less "retinal," or simply pleasing to the eye. Duchamp's art work challenged the very notion of what was "art," as in his 1917 "Fountain," a urinal Duchamp placed in the middle of a gallery space and only attributed as "R Mutt."